Every inch Russia takes in Ukraine comes at a brutal cost.

Tanks burn, assault squads disappear, and entire offensives grind to a halt with the smallest patch of ground.

Because Ukraine has turned itself into something almost impossible to swallow, a steel porcupine.

A country bristling with drones, missiles, mines, layered defenses, and a military bats learn how to punish every advance.

Push forward and the quills come out.

Every step hurts.

Every breakthrough attempt becomes a bloodbath.

That’s why Russia is bleeding for every inch.

And the idea behind this strategy comes from one of nature’s most deceptively dangerous animals, the porcupine.

These small rodents would be easy prey for all sorts of predators, from owls and eagles to bobcats, wolves, and coyotes if not for the iconic quote of quills that cover their bodies.

These hardened hairs provide the porcupine with one of the most powerful natural defense mechanisms mother nature ever invented.

Each creature can have more than 30,000 of them in total.

Sharp, stiff, and barbed, they detach easily from the porcupine’s body, digging into any predator that gets too close.

They make porcupines difficult for any larger creatures to consume, while also providing a clear visual deterrent, discouraging predators from even attempting to attack them.

This in turn allows porcupines to survive and thrive even in areas where much larger and stronger creatures may roam.

In the same vein, the steel porcupine strategy is designed to help Ukraine ward off attackers and withstand invasions even when facing up against much larger enemies like Russia.

The core concepts of this strategy are quite simple.

Rather than focusing on projecting power outwards and enhancing its offensive capacities, the country in question, in this case Ukraine, focuses instead on maximizing its defenses, building its quills in the form of dense defensive weapons, layered anti-air systems, harden infrastructure, and strong civilian resistance capabilities.

The end goal isn’t to actually defeat a large invading force or aggressor, but to make the very prospect of invading so difficult, so expensive, and so painful that they don’t want to do it in the first place.

In short, it’s about deterrence.

The porcupine’s quills deter predators from coming too close to it, encouraging them instead to seek out easier, less protected prey elsewhere.

The steel porcupine strategy follows that same idea.

Making a country so fortified that any would be aggressors are forced to think twice about attacking it.

It’s simple in theory, but to actually put this strategy into action can involve years, even decades of effort.

Because a country that wants to cement itself as a steel porcupine needs to develop and deploy a vast interconnected array of defenses that can include anti-access and aerial denial assets like missiles, mines, and drones as well as asymmetric warfare
equipment like portable anti-tank missiles and manportable air defense systems or man pads.

These countries also need to level up their border defenses, setting up everything from hardened bunkers and prepared ambush zones to fortified supply lines.

What’s more, modern-day steel porcupines also need to be ready for attacks on all fronts with the latest and greatest cyber defenses and electronic warfare equipment to fend off unseen assaults.

And they need their people, not just their armies, but their civilians, too, to be ready, willing, and able to stand up and defend their territory if and when a crisis situation comes along.

Putting all of those different puzzle pieces into place is an enormous challenge, even at the best of times.

Now, imagine having to do it in the middle of a war when you’re already having to fend off a larger opponent and deal with daily assaults, drone strikes, and frontline bombardments.

That’s what Ukraine had to do.

Any military analysts would have called it an impossible task.

Yet, as we’ve seen time after time, for Ukraine, nothing is impossible.

From day one of this war, KE’s forces proved that they were capable of far more than Russia and the rest of the world gave them credit for.

Naturally, they struggled in the early stages.

They suddenly found themselves facing off against one of the world’s biggest and strongest armies.

Russian troops marched over the borders of Ukraine in 2022 from multiple directions.

steamrolling towards major towns and cities with the express intent of wiping out any resistance in their way.

Many of those troops were later found to have packed parade uniforms.

They weren’t gearing up for a grinding long-term war.

They thought they’d be partying on the streets of Kev in a matter of days, that their so-called special military operation would be over and done with in no time at all.

Many in the West also doubted Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but that only made things harder for the Ukrainian armed forces, who desperately needed aid and supplies from other nations, but consistently had to wait to get any sort of serious help.

Indeed, back in those early stages, Western countries were so concerned about the risk of potentially escalating the situation, it made them extremely wary about providing weapons, armor, or defensive systems.

In early 2022, Germany, for example, infamously offered Ukraine not tanks, missiles, or air defenses, but a few thousand helmets.

It was only weeks into the war when Ukraine had defied expectations, and Russia had failed to achieve the rapid victory that so many predicted that Western support started to scale up.

Even then, aid often came with caveats.

Time and time again, Kev was forced to wait while weapons shipments were delayed, disrupted, or scaled down.

As the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zilinski put it during his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, “We’re thankful for every delivery, but high took months.

Tanks took months.

Jets took years.

We cannot afford to lose a single day.

Equipment eventually arrived, but often in limited quantities, poor condition, or with strict strings attached.

Many countries forbid Ukraine from using their weapons on Russian soil, for example.

limiting Ke’s options when it came to planning counterattacks against its aggressor.

Russia, meanwhile, made the most of the West’s hesitancy.

Its president, Vladimir Putin, made regular threats, publicly announcing his intentions to strike back at any nation that dared intervene in his special military operation.

Meanwhile, his troops pushed on, intensifying their aggression and seizing their chance to steal as much land as they could.

Ukraine was trapped, constrained, facing near insurmountable odds, but still somehow it endured.

It withtood the immense tests and challenges of those early months, surviving one year of war after another, and it’s still standing today.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to toil.

Its forces move at a snail’s pace.

Its assault squads are repeatedly routed.

Its gains are minimal, and its prospects are increasingly grim.

This despite having almost every conceivable advantage on its side from the very start of the war.

Unlike Ukraine, Russia didn’t have to worry about defending its territory from multiple axes of attack.

It didn’t have to deal with unreliable allies and aid delays.

It instead was able to spend a small fortune on charad drones from Iran and even got help from the Iranian military to design and develop those drones at its own factories.

Another ally, North Korea, also gave Russian munitions, labor, and even boots on the ground.

While China and India continued to invest heavily in Russian resources, with the former also providing all important dual use components that the Kremlin needed to continue maintaining its enormous armor fleet and manufacturing drones, bombs, and missiles in enormous quantities.

Russia had everything going its way for a very long time.

Yet, it experienced one dismal failure after another, embarrassing itself on the global stage and undermining the long-running myth that its military was still as mighty and formidable as the iconic Red Army of the Soviet Union.

As one Ukrainian commander, Anatoli Kachenko of the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade notes, “In 4 years, the USSR defeated Germany.

In four years, the Russians have only managed to take half of Daetsk region.

” It’s a startling but entirely accurate assessment of Russia’s utter failure and Ukraine’s astonishing success.

And it all boils down to not only Russia’s incompetence, but also Ke’s miraculous ability to adapt, to build, and strengthen its steel porcupine strategy while simultaneously fending off near constant attacks and bombardments.

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Now, Ukraine didn’t manage to defend itself through sheer grit alone, and it certainly didn’t manage it through superior resources or a bigger budget than its opponent.

Instead, it was all about adaptation.

Right from the start, Kev’s forces had to think outside the box.

They had no other choice.

As Barbet, a deputy commander in the 63rd separate mechanized brigades unmanned systems battalion puts it, the country had to resort to a poor man solution of taking simple commercial hobby drones and converting them into disposable weapons and scouting tools.

That seemingly simple move changed everything.

All of a sudden, with eyes in the skies far and wide across its territory, Ukraine not only enjoyed a constant and stable stream of intelligence, but also made it almost impossible for its enemy to do anything without them knowing about it.

This, in effect, became the first line of defense in Ukraine’s steel porcupine strategy.

Cheap and relatively rudimentary unmanned aerial vehicles formed a formidable drone wall, which Russia has since struggled to bypass.

Because not only were those drones scanning the surroundings and providing valuable data to ground units, but they were also used to strike back at the enemy, targeting the weak points of tanks, armored vehicles, and personnel carriers, wiping out Russia’s armor advantage, one asset at a time.

Now, years into the conflict, Ukraine has the means to produce literally millions of these drones.

And Russia, for once, has had to adapt.

Instead of continuing to deploy strong tank columns and other armor over the border, it’s resorted to deploying infantry only assault squads, sending dozens of men to their doom without armor of any kind to cover or support them.

It’s a suicidal strategy, and the stats back it up.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, notes that since the start of the invasion, Russia has suffered well over a million casualties, far more than in any war since World War II.

In fact, it’s lost far more men in this one conflict than in all of the wars it’s participated in since the end of the Second World War.

Putin might argue that those deaths are all worthwhile.

If Russia was actually making serious gains on the ground, capturing towns and cities with ease and swiftness, but it isn’t.

The CSIS report goes on to note that Russia’s campaign of conquest is moving at a veritable snail’s pace with an average rate of between 15 and 70 m per day in their most prominent offensives, slower than almost any major offensive campaign in any war in the last century.

Despite all their modern technologies and knowledge, Russia’s troops are gaining ground slower than the Allied forces in World War I, and they’re dying in greater and greater numbers with every passing month.

Because the steel porcupine is getting stronger, Ukraine doesn’t just have more drones than ever before.

It also has a greater variety of unmanned vehicles at its disposal, ranging from simple scouting units to far larger bombing drones capable of taking out enemy weapons plants and ammo stocks.

With so many options, Russia is finding it increasingly difficult to defend against them.

Its troops never know what sorts of weapons might be headed their way.

One Russia war correspondent summed up the grim state of affairs facing his country’s forces in late 2025, stating that the average life cycle of a Russian assault soldier is just 12 days.

And that these same soldiers only have a 50/50 chance of even making it to the front lines without being killed on route.

Even those that make it to the front are inevitably doomed.

sent out on suicide missions into hostile territories, but Ukrainian drone crews and artillery units are simply waiting to pick them off one by one.

Thanks to this, Ukraine’s aim to push Russia’s casualty number even higher up to the 50,000 Russian casualties per month mark no longer seems impossible or even excessively ambitious, but truly realistic.

And if Kev can pull that off, Russia may very well be doomed because it’s no longer able to recruit troops in sufficient quantities to replace those that have been killed or wounded.

Its army is no longer expanding, but stagnating and even starting to shrink.

With fewer boots on the ground and a continued reluctance to rely on armor, Russia’s offensive is only going to get slower, weaker, and more wasteful from here on out.

Ukraine, meanwhile, just keeps on constructing more and more quills, more layered defenses, more ways to make Russia’s invasion feel like the worst decision in the country’s entire history.

That doesn’t only include drones, but missiles, too.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, Ukraine invested heavily in domestic long-range missile development, elevating its abilities to strike deep into the heart of Russia, hundreds of miles beyond its own borders.

From the long Neptune to the flamingo, Ukraine now has more powerful, far-reaching weapons to call on to deal massive damage to the Kremlin’s high value assets, including fuel depots, oil refineries, and military production plants.

And it’s putting those weapons to extremely good use.

Bloomberg reports that over the course of 2025, for example, Ukraine orchestrated no fewer than 120 strikes on Russian energy facilities, generating a whopping1 trillion rubles, 12.

9 billion worth of damage.

Now, both drones and missiles are regularly dispatched from Ukrainian launch zones, flying far into Russian territory, taking out one target after another.

At C2, Ukraine’s drones and missiles have forced the Russian Black Sea fleet into hiding, neutralizing around a third of its enemy’s vessels and pushing others back.

Warships, submarines, frigots, and destroyers have all been rendered utterly ineffective, giving Russia fewer and fewer options to organize its own attacks.

In the air, too, Ukrainian drones have brought helicopters and even fighter jets, some of which were worth tens of millions of dollars, out of the air.

Then there was the iconic Operation Spiderweb attack of 2025, which dealt an enormous blow to Russia’s bomber fleet.

Over and over, Ukraine is sending a clear message to the Kremlin.

If you hit us, then we’ll hit you back even harder.

On top of all of this, Ukraine has also managed to massively reduce its reliance on Western allies.

It still needs their support, of course, but it’s dramatically more independent and capable of standing on its own two feet today than it was back in 2022.

Indeed, since the invasion began, the Ukrainian defense sector has grown from almost non- entity into a sprawling enormous industry with more than 1,000 firms, most of which are private.

Those companies employ hundreds of thousands of workers, and together they’re providing the fuel, ammo, and systems that keep KE’s war machine up and running.

96% of the drones Ukraine uses today, for example, are made domestically.

So are 99% of the robotic systems used by the country’s military.

Domestically produced 155 mm Bodana artillery systems also make up around 40% of Ukraine’s artillery usage along the front lines.

And more than half of all the weapons used by the Ukrainian army are now made in Ukraine.

The country has also developed its own extraordinary air defense network featuring numerous missiles, launch platforms, turrets, and other assets, all bearing the made in Ukraine label.

And it’s not stopping there.

In 2025, Ukraine authorized over 1,300 new models of domestically produced weapons and military equipment.

And there are hundreds more projects still in development, ready to unleash on Russia as and when the time is right.

Kev has also expedited its innovation, cutting the red tape and bureaucracy that so often interferes in the military development process.

Its contractors have the freedom to design and roll out new weapons and systems quickly and easily, responding to soldier feedback to improve their creations in real time.

Once the war ends, all of this technology is going to be worth a fortune for Ukraine, ensuring it will have the investment, partnerships, and trade deals needed to continue maintaining and expanding its steel porcupine strategy for decades to come.

In fact, countries already lining up to learn from Ukraine’s defense firms and buy up the country’s worldleading drones and defensive systems.

There are plans in place for 10 new Ukrainian weapons export centers all over Europe in 2026, with drone production plants also opening up in locations like Germany and the UK.

Multiple German and even American companies have also announced deals with Ukrainian defense contractors to work on everything from AIG guided strike drones to unmanned ground vehicles.

All of this is a testament to Ukraine’s unparalleled ability to adapt.

So many other countries would have buckled and broken beneath the sheer weight of Russia’s vast military force.

So many would have struggled to survive even the early weeks and months of a war like this, let alone several years.

Ukraine has achieved something miraculous.

And thanks to the steel porcupine strategy, it’s ready for whatever comes next.

Russia may persist with this war for months or even years to come.

or Putin may eventually realize what a horrific mistake he made and attempt to broker some sort of feasible peace deal.

Either way, Ukraine is prepared not only to defend itself today, but to put itself in the strongest possible position tomorrow, the day after, and all the days that follow.

With a small budget, scant resources, and a near endless array of problems to solve along the way, it’s made itself a military superpower, forging defenses that are the envy of countries across the globe.

It’s made its territory impossible to take and its defensive lines impossible to breach.

It’s forced Russia into a position where it has to sacrifice more men, more resources, more money, and more time to take even a single sliver of land, rendering the entire war effort a grizzly, grueling, and interminable slog for the Kremlin’s forces.

Thanks to
that, Ukraine may very well win this war after all.

Putin tried to break Ukraine.

He expected Kev to fall in days.

He expected the Ukrainian government to collapse.

He expected the country to fracture under the sheer weight of Russia’s military power.

Instead, the exact opposite happened.

Ukraine didn’t break.

Russia did.

Despite launching the largest invasion in Europe since World War II, Moscow has failed to capture Kev, failed to topple Ukraine’s government, and continues to suffer staggering casualties, economic strain, and growing isolation on the world stage.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has only grown stronger, forging powerful alliances, transforming its military, and turning itself into one of the most innovative fighting forces in the world.

Putin certainly never saw this coming when he gave the green light for his so-called special military operation back in February of 2022.

Back then, he had a clear plan of action and firm expectations of how the subsequent days, weeks, and months would pan out.

Publicly, he spoke about saving Ukrainians and ethnic Russians from the country’s neo-Nazi regime, despite having no credible evidence to back up his claims.

He also spoke about taking control of Ukraine’s eastern regions, including Daetsk and Luhansk.

Privately, however, intelligence reports found that the Kremlin had much bigger plans in mind.

It didn’t just want to take over parts of Ukraine.

It wanted the entire country.

Now, before the invasion even began, Russian Federal Security Service FSB agents were eyeing up apartments in Kev, putting their pieces in position for a complete breakdown of Ukraine’s government.

Once the country’s president, Vladimir Zalinski, was removed from power, the Kremlin would install its own puppet government, turning Ukraine from a free and independent nation in charge of its own destiny into another Russian vassal state like Bellarus.

Many expected Russia would get what it wanted.

The sheer weight and size of the Russian army would surely prove too much for Ukraine to bear.

And even if Kee mustered some sort of defense, it would only be a matter of time until its fortifications were smashed and Moscow got exactly what it wanted.

In short, Ukraine was supposed to be annihilated, broken down bit by bit before being pieced back together exactly as Vladimir Putin saw fit.

Russia, meanwhile, was supposed to emerge victorious and triumphant into a new era of even greater power and influence.

Then there was Putin himself.

There’s no doubt he saw his special military operation as the chance to cement his legacy, to go down in history as a tactical genius and perhaps Russia’s greatest ever leader.

He already evidently sees himself as some sort of modern-day Peter the Great, and the conquest of Ukraine would once and for all solidify his reputation as perhaps the most powerful man on the planet.

From there, there’s evidence to suggest that Russia might have had additional plans, with the Kremlin potentially plotting additional invasions of former Soviet republics or even an attack on NATO, which remains a very real possibility to this day.

But now, years after the invasion began, it’s clear to see Moscow’s plan didn’t merely backfire.

It went dramatically wrong in almost every conceivable way.

Ukraine didn’t break.

Its government didn’t collapse.

Its people didn’t wave the white flag, and its defenses didn’t fall apart in the wake of the Russian army’s attacks.

That’s not to say that the country didn’t suffer.

Ukraine has endured terrible, unprecedented losses.

It’s withstood intensive and persistent bombing and drone attacks.

It has seen its towns and cities wiped off the map.

It’s lost approximately 20% of its territory to Russia.

And its people have been the victim of atrocious war crimes like the horrific BHA massacre in which innocent civilians were slaughtered in the streets and tortured at the hands of heartless Russian soldiers.

Yet through it all, Ukraine has never given up.

Its people never bent the knee, nor did they celebrate the Russian army’s arrival with flowers and cheers, as some Kremlin officials foolishly believed they would.

Instead, many of them took up arms, banded together, and defended their land with unimaginable courage.

Faced with the prospect of a potential genocide and the complete erasure of their culture, freedoms, and way of life, they rose up.

They refused to allow Russia to simply cannibalize their country, putting their own lives on the line in defense of their country.

Many experts and analysts have attributed the incredible defense of Ukraine to the innate resilience of its people.

But that’s a very simple and even shallow way of summing up a much greater, deeper, and more complex concept.

Resilience has played a huge part in the defense of Ukraine.

without a doubt.

But the country’s survival and subsequent fight back demanded much more than that.

It required an immense amount of strategic planning, careful resource management, shrewd political ingenuity, and military innovation for this nation, which is so much smaller than its enemy, to stand up and defend itself as successfully as it has.

Ukraine has also had to be able to respond and adapt rapidly to the crises and challenges imposed by the war.

It hasn’t had the luxury of time or the freedom to spend days and weeks debating big decisions or mulling over possible tactics.

It’s been forced to act almost on instinct.

And that was something that the country learned very early on.

Indeed, mere days into the full-scale invasion, Ukraine was faced with a stark and brutal reality.

Act or die.

Survival required speed, clarity, and unity of command.

The country had spent several decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union establishing democratic institutions and decentralizing authority.

But all of that had to be put on the back burner.

An immediate and dramatic recalibration was required.

Decisions needed to be made more quickly and there was no room for red tape and bureaucracy to get in the way when so many lives and the very future of Ukraine were at stake.

With Russian forces advancing rapidly and missile strikes threatening major cities, any delay, disruption, or hesitation could have been fatal.

As a result, the Zilinski government soon became much more hierarchical.

This wasn’t Ukraine abandoning democracy.

It was in fact the only viable way to protect it.

While Russia had hoped that the strength and swiftness of its attack would confuse or even paralyze the Ukrainian government to the point of collapse, the opposite occurred instead.

Kev’s leadership adapted.

It made the necessary changes, consolidating authority, centralizing command, and coordinating its military maneuvers.

But this concentration of power has also raised concerns about democratic oversight and institutional independence during wartime.

Russia saw a weakness, but Ukraine turned it into a strength.

Then it went further.

It built bonds with new allies across the Western world, strengthening relationships with nations like the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Scandinavian nations, Poland, and others, acquiring the financial, military, and humanitarian support it needed not just to survive, but to strike back at its enemy.

It also worked hard at developing its own domestic defense industry with dozens of new companies springing up to design and develop new weapons, drones, air defenses, and other assets.

Many of which have proven vital and valuable in the fight to defend Ukraine and damage Russia.

One step at a time, Ukraine set about building the strongest, most fearsome military force in all of Europe.

This shouldn’t have been able to happen.

Ukraine didn’t have the same sort of budget, means, manpower, or resources as European powerhouses like France, Germany, and the UK.

Yet, in many metrics, it has since surpassed them all, defying odds and shattering expectations over and over again.

Now, before the war began, Ukraine was certainly not regarded as any sort of major military power, nor would its name come up in discussions of the most important and influential countries in Europe.

Now, it’s a major player, not just in the military world, but on the global geopolitical stage.

Funnily enough, this is exactly what Ukrainian patriots and nationalists had wanted to see happen for decades.

And it took a Russian president, Putin, to make their dreams come true.

Those same patriots also dreamed of seeing their country come together and the Ukrainian people united at last, standing side by side for a common cause.

That prayer, too, was answered by Putin.

Prior to the war, the Ukrainian people, much like plenty of other populations around the world, had diverse views regarding their country’s leadership, their relationship with Russia, and their place on the world stage.

But when war comes along, there’s no room for fence sitting.

People are forced to pick a side, and Putin made that decision incredibly easy for the Ukrainian people.

Many of them had friends and family in Russia and had spent much of their lives seeing the country in a relatively favorable light.

The invasion changed all that.

Suddenly, Russia was an aggressor, an invader, an enemy.

Thanks to Putin, a country and people that many Ukrainians at least respected, if not admired, was turned overnight, into its greatest nemesis.

The Ukrainian people, meanwhile, largely put aside their differences, banding together as brothers and sisters in arms against a common foe.

And while Ukraine grew stronger, Russia began to crumble.

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Ukraine could have simply rolled over and fallen under Russia’s control.

It didn’t.

And today, it’s a much stronger, more powerful, and more inspiring presence on the world stage than at any other point in its history.

Tragically, tens of thousands of its people have been killed to reach this point.

But it continues to show those same qualities of grit, determination, resilience, and adaptability that have fueled its astonishing ascent since 2022.

Russia, meanwhile, has gone in the exact opposite direction.

Before the war began, Russia was seen as one of the most fearsome, formidable nations on Earth.

Everyone, even the world’s mightiest military powers, was concerned about the prospect of war with Russia.

And many fear that if and when Putin gave the order to attack, almost no nation would be able to stand in its way.

They foresaw the mighty Russia war machine rampaging across Europe, taking territory and subjugating all enemies in its way by force with an almost endless supply of troops, tanks, and armored vehicles, proving too much for anyone to handle.

But the war with Ukraine has shattered the myth of Russian might.

It’s revealed the weakness of its army, the incompetence of its commanders, and the desperation of its leadership.

And while Ukraine has suffered terrible loss of life, there’s at least an argument that those people died for a cause.

Russia, meanwhile, has lost people in far greater numbers, with estimates suggesting that the country has crossed a miserable milestone of more than 1.

25 25 million casualties in total with several hundred,000 soldiers killed in action and countless more wounded so severely that they’ll never be able to be fit to return to the battlefield.

Those soldiers didn’t die for some grand cause.

They didn’t lay their lives on the line so that Russian forces could make great gains, capture important towns and cities, and push on towards a historic victory.

In fact, the charts show that Russia today holds barely a fraction more land in Ukraine than it did back in 2022, the year the war began.

What’s more, the country’s forces are moving at such a slow pace, trading dozens or even hundreds of lives for the tiniest, most meaningless patches of land that it would take decades of effort and unimaginable losses for them to even get close to the end goal of conquering the country in its entirety.

Even in the areas where Russia has amassed the biggest numbers of troops and exerted the most aggression, its rate of progress remains embarrassing.

For example, between February 2024 and January 2026, Russian troops advanced a little less than 50 km from Abdithka to Prosk.

That’s a rate of around 70 m per day, which is slower than the Allied forces rate of progress during the famous Battle of the Som in World War I.

Even with today’s modern technology and tactics, plus its massive manpower advantage, Russia isn’t even managing to match the kind of gain seen a century ago.

Its offensives in other areas have been even slower and less efficient, with vast numbers of soldiers being killed for almost zero gains on the ground.

What’s more, even when Russia does manage to make gains, all it’s usually doing is taking over pointless pieces of territory that have been absolutely blown to bits by artillery, fire, drones, bombs, and mines, or tiny abandoned settlements filled with wreckage, rubble, and the charred smoldering remains of former homes and structures.

In short, the country isn’t getting anything out of this war, but it’s paying a remarkably high price by keeping it going in four allimportant areas: casualties, the economy, public opinion, and world standing.

Let’s look at each of those in turn.

Beginning with casualties.

As mentioned earlier, Russia has suffered enormous losses.

It’s crossed milestone over milestone, losing 100,000 of its troops, then 200,000, 500,000, a million, and the number keeps rising.

To put those losses into context, Russia suffered several times more casualties in its war with Ukraine than in every other war it’s been involved in since the end of the Second World War.

That includes the two Chetchin wars, the Soviet Union’s 10-year war with Afghanistan, and additional conflicts in places like Korea, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

Even if you add up all of the Russian and Soviet soldiers killed and wounded in those conflicts, it pales in comparison to the losses Putin has now inflicted on his army.

For a time, those losses, while dramatic, were still sustainable to an extent.

Even if Russia lost 30,000 troops in a single month, it was able to recruit 30,000 more to replace them.

But that’s all starting to change.

The latest reports showed that Russia is increasingly unable to recruit the people it needs to cover up and counteract its losses.

Its army is no longer growing and is instead set to start shrinking as the war rages on.

When it comes to the economy too, Russia is in a death spiral.

Having spent extravagant amounts on its military-industrial complex, pouring billions and billions into recruitment drives, drone production plants, soldier salaries, procurement, missiles, development projects, and more.

The country has depleted its national wealth fund.

It’s also suffered the increasingly crippling effects of Western sanctions, which have only grown more severe and intense as time has gone by.

Ukraine 2 has played its part, using drone warfare to wipe out high-V value targets across Russia’s territory, plunging the country into a costly fuel crisis, which it’s still struggling to navigate.

All of these issues have added up, taking an unprecedented toll on Russia’s once strong economy.

While Moscow was able to withstand the early stages of sanctions and other economic impacts of the war, it’s really feeling the heat now.

Foreign investment has been slashed with fewer and fewer countries willing to do business with Putin, the wararmonger.

Long-term productivity prospects appear increasingly bleak thanks to the country’s worsening labor shortage.

And Russia’s GDP growth has swiftly declined, reaching almost stagnation level.

Plus, the country is so busy pouring around half of its budget into the armed forces and defense contracts, it’s falling rapidly behind in other important areas like AI and emerging technologies.

So, even if the war miraculously ended, Russia would still find itself lagging dangerously behind other world powers, becoming increasingly irrelevant as the years go by.

And with an economy over 13 times smaller than the United States and about eight times smaller than China’s, Russia still has a massive amount of catching up to do if it ever wants to be taken seriously as a superpower again.

Putin has also seen a stock with the Russian public plummet in the years since the war began.

While many Russians have had variable views of their president during his more than 20 years in power, a large part of the population at least respected him or felt that he was the right man for the unenviable task of presiding over such a vast land mass.

His decisions to start a war with Ukraine, a country that many Russians viewed as a fraternal and friendly neighbor, and to persist with that war year after year, despite heavy losses and no notable gains, have caused a massive shift in the national mood.

Estimates suggest that up to a million Russians have left the country since the war began, with many feeling utterly ashamed of their president’s actions.

Some have even taken up arms against their motherland, siding with the Ukrainians and supporting their cause.

Among those that remain in Russia, opinions have slowly but surely turned against the Kremlin.

With an increasing majority of people eager to see an end to the fighting at last, many Russians have felt the effects of the war firsthand.

They’ve lost friends, neighbors, and family members in the conflict or witnessed the gradual degradation of their country and the loss of former liberties as everything from internet access to international travel has been restricted for them.

Far from going down in history as the 21st century’s Peter the Great, Putin now runs the risk of becoming the most hated ruler in Russia’s long and storied history, he’s also managed to diminish his country’s standing on the world stage like never before.

Perhaps he expected other nations to be too frightened or overwhelmed to stand against him.

Instead, large parts of the world have wholeheartedly shunned Russia, severing diplomatic and business ties, cancelling imports and exports, tearing up agreements, and strengthening connections with other better allies instead.

Even those countries that were historically the closest to Russia, like many of the former Soviet republics, have turned their backs on it, leaving Moscow with a tiny pool of potential allies to call on, including China, Iran, and North Korea.

With trade, investment, and support all slipping, the country’s crisis are only going to get worse from here on out.

All of Putin’s dreams went up in smoke, and his worst nightmares came to life instead.

His allies and influence slowly disappeared.

His people turned against him.

His economy crumbled and his legacy went with it.

Meanwhile, Ukraine galvanized.

NATO strengthened.

And the world woke up to the reality that Russia, in fact, wasn’t as scary and strong as it had always appeared.

Putin has no one to blame for this mess but himself.

He held the shovel.

He dug the hole.

And now he’s in far too deep to have any hope of climbing back out.

One thing’s been clear since day one of the Russia Ukraine war.

Ukraine is the underdog.

It can’t match Russia’s massive manpower advantage, nor can it compete with the Kremlin’s almost endless stock piles of tanks, armored vehicles, and other equipment.

Ukraine can, however, match and even surpass Russia when it comes to strategy.

And that’s exactly what has kept Keev in this fight for so long.

Ukraine’s military masterminds and tactical commanders have consistently found ways to out thing their often stubborn and wasteful opponents.

And one of the most effective strategies, the bait and bleed, is used on a daily basis up and down the extensive front lines to create death traps for Russian assault squads.

So today, we’ll take a closer look at how it works.

But before we get to the details, we first have to understand the context.

In a conventional invasion situation, you have an aggressor, the invader, and a defender, the country getting invaded.

The defender will often set up fortified locations along the edge of their territory, which the aggressor will seek to break down.

This forms the famous front lines of the conflict, with one side digging in and defending its land to the last man, while the other bombards and assaults its opponent in an attempt to penetrate the defensive lines and capture land bit by bit.

From there, it’s simply a question of which side can do the better job at either holding the line or breaking through it.

This is how war has worked for generations.

And it’s why frontline movements and territorial gains and losses have always been such clear and helpful indicators of how a war is progressing and which side is winning or losing.

But Ukraine’s tacticians quickly realize that this conventional predictable approach wouldn’t work for them.

Why? because they’re facing a much larger and stronger force than their own.

If they followed the classic playbook of trying to dig in and defend every last little inch of ground, they might be able to delay Russia’s advances, but the eventual outcome would always be the same.

Through sheer quantity of soldiers and brute force tactics, Russia would eventually wear down Ukraine’s defenses and break through its lines.

In short, it would only be a matter of time until Russia ultimately got what it wanted, taking over the territories of Daetsk, Luhansk, and others, and even potentially pushing on to capture Kev and other parts of the country, too.

For Ukraine, that’s not an option.

So, its commanders had to figure out a way to guard their ground and fend off Russian assaults without simply sacrificing soldiers needlessly in the process.

They realized that it was much smarter to sometimes give up ground on a temporary basis in order to preserve their units and resources and then strike back at the same location to reclaim it from the Russians when the time was right.

This thinking in a nutshell formed the foundation of the bait and bleed strategy.

It’s a four-step process and it’s ruthlessly efficient.

Step one is when Ukraine sets its trap and lays its bait and this is the key to the entire process.

The idea here is for Ukrainian soldiers to lure Russian assault squads, which typically involve 35 to 50 dismounted troops, into specific areas.

To do this, Ukraine makes the most of one of its biggest advantages, the fact that it’s fighting on its own land.

Using their knowledge of the local landscape and terrain, Ukrainian units identify the perfect places to set their traps.

Then they make use of diverse tools and techniques including mines, obstacles, wire, ditches, and concrete to essentially funnel the enemy towards those locations.

When faced with these kinds of obstacles, Russian squads are presented with a few options.

They can spread out and potentially lose cohesion in an attempt to figure out other ways around the obstacles or attempt to go through them, which could lead to wasted time and needless losses.

or they could follow the seemingly safe path towards their enemy’s location.

More often than not, they’ll take that seemingly safe path.

And that’s exactly what Ukraine is banking on.

That’s where step two comes in.

A war like this punishes mass.

If Ukraine makes the mistake of stacking too many soldiers together in one place, Russia will target and take them out with artillery strikes.

The same logic applies with vehicles and other assets.

If too many of them are all bunched up together, it’s easy for enemy drones to spot those condensed clusters and take them out.

So instead of having large quantities of troops guarding its trap locations, Ukraine often only has relatively small squads at each one.

They’re not there to hold the line or dig in and fend off the enemy until their final breath.

Instead, their role is simple.

When they see the Russian assault squads entering the area, they fire a few shots their way, which further incites the enemy to march towards that specific location.

Then they take a moment to assess the density of the opposing force before beginning a pre-planned retreat to a safer location, deeper into their own territory.

On the face of it, it may look like the Ukrainian troops are panicking, frightened, and fleeing for their lives.

They’re not, but that’s exactly the impression they want to give to their enemy.

They want the Russians to feel cocky and confident enough to move in and start their own attempts to lock down that location, blissfully unaware that they’re marching straight into a Ukrainian death trap.

Again, more often than not, that’s exactly what happens.

Because Russians are predictable, their army has followed similar tactics over the course of the entire war, learning little and persisting with the same stubborn, wasteful strategies that have seen them struggle to make any meaningful gains or claim any big victories for several years.

When
Russian assault squads see their enemies running away from a location they were just defending, they see an opportunity to take some land to extend their advantage.

So, they move in.

But Ukraine is always watching them as the front lines are absolutely saturated with surveillance drones.

Both sides always have eyes in the skies, looking out across the battlefield, scanning their surroundings, gathering and feeding invaluable intelligence to troops on the ground.

Those drones watch and wait as the Russians move in, while crews keep local units informed about the size of the assault squad and what sorts of weapons and additional assets, if any, they’re working with.

All of that information is important for the next step of the plan.

Step three, the counterattack.

Once the Russians have moved in and are busy celebrating what appears to be an important victory, Ukraine seizes the opportunity to spring its trap and strike back.

All of a sudden, they rain down fire on the Russian assault team, hitting them with everything they’ve got.

That includes mortars and tube artillery to strike quickly and efficiently at the Russian units before they even have time to figure out what’s happening to them.

Strike drones and loiter munitions may also be used to mop up any stragglers and take out any vehicles the assault squads might try to use to escape.

Their position, which had seemed so safe and secure mere moments ago, suddenly becomes the most dangerous place on the map.

And remember, this was all pre-planned by Ukraine.

So, they would have already had artillery, drone crews, and other offensive systems prepped, positioned, and ready to fire all at a moment’s notice.

What’s more, since Ukraine’s troops were holding those exact same locations mere minutes before, they know the exact coordinates.

They know the surrounding lay of the land, the terrain, the geography, and conditions.

All of that information makes it remarkably straightforward for them to bombard those locations with optimal efficiency, leaving no one alive to tell the tale.

Ukrainian troops even sometimes set up secondary kill zones just in case the Russians have the time and wherewithal to attempt their own retreat.

Thanks to the mines and other obstacles Ukrainian troops have placed in the surrounding locations, they often know exactly which routes the Russians will take so can target them too.

setting up additional traps, artillery teams, and loitering munitions nearby, ready to keep up the fire, not only on any retreating Russians, but also any resupply or reinforcement lines, too.

So, even if the assault team has time to radio for backup, any additional trucks or troops that attempt to move into that area will be picked off just as easily as all the rest.

Again, drones are vital here.

They provide the constant surveillance and stream of intelligence Ukraine needs to plan and execute these attacks.

Thanks to their eyes in the sky, Ukrainian teams are always aware of what the enemy is doing.

And that allows them to also always be one step ahead of them.

And once the Russian units have been wiped out, Ukraine finishes its bait and bleed strategy with the fourth and final step, reclaiming its territory.

With the threat eliminated, the same troops that retreated from the trap location mere moments ago are free to move right back in, resuming their surveillance and getting ready to repeat the same process all over again, just as soon as the next Russian assault
arrives.

And here’s the part most observers miss.

But before we dig any deeper into why this strategy works so well, if this is the kind of insight you want more of, make sure you’re subscribed to the Military Show.

We break it down like this every week.

Now, back to the trap.

This strategy is in many ways representative of the vast difference in tactical thinking between the two sides.

On the one hand, there’s Russia, which has a vastly larger army and has been consistently able to recruit more and more soldiers to replace those that it’s lost in Ukraine.

Thanks to that fact, the Kremlin’s commanders have persisted with highly wasteful tactics throughout the war so far.

Time and time again, they’ve proven that they’re happy to throw men into the meat grinder, making the same mistakes while hoping that brute force will eventually be enough to achieve their aims.

They don’t get sentimental about soldiers deaths and injuries.

All they care about are territorial gains because that to them is proof that they’re winning the war.

As such, they’re perfectly content to sacrifice squads for a few square feet of enemy territory, which is why we see so many of these small assault groups targeting Ukrainian locations all along the vast front lines day in and day out.

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